I revere the Adirondacks as much as the next yahoo, but I gotta tell ya, these woods can get down right stinky. Have you ever gone into the woods to collect kindling for a campfire, reached down to pick up some black cherry twigs, and come up with a fistful of vile smelling, Jell-O’ee, wetwood slime. That stuff’s nasty. Fresh bear poop smells like Old Spice when compared to wetwood slime. Chemicals in the slime prevent wounded cherry trees from healing, kills neighboring plants and can be used to refinish antique furniture. I double dare you to try it. Wetwood slime stink beggars description.  

There’s one Adirondack stink that I carry home frequently. When stream fishing for trout, I always dress in my stream fishing uniform. It includes quick drying wading pants, neoprene wading guards over Polartec socks, and sexy faux leather wading shoes. If zee angler is to catch zee Adirondack brook trout, he must slog to where zey live. This inevitably leads one into muck, mire and quicksand, all of which fill your wading socks and shoes with stinky primordial ooze. Adirondack ooze is the essential building block upon which life as we know it is based. The fact that is smells like raw sewage is only fully appreciated once I return to camp and hang my wet wading togs in the garage to cure. The garage is my decontamination pod, aka, human car wash. It’s a man cave with overhead doors.  

It seems that the natural stink of wet Polartec and neoprene is greatly enhanced by the combination of foot sweat and pulverized decomposing organic matter, some of which must be centuries old. I’m no geologist, but I’m thinking if I’m sinking up to my knees in organic ooze, the soles of my wading shoes are pureeing putrid organisms that were buried in the early 19th century. Just think about the history I’m squashing when I sink down to my butt, like I did on the last day of stream fishing. I could’ve stepped on a rotting brontosaurus for crying out loud. True Adirondackers are blessed with the permanent stink of primordial ooze.    

Speaking of sewage, nothing says Adirondack stink like a well used outhouse. We had one at Camp Moosemaple One that stood for thirty years and I don’t believe it was the hemlock two by fours that held it up. Nobody dallied in that baby. Our outhouse could smell you stories of fabulous meals at Eckerson’s and too many last calls at the Hard Times. Without becoming too graphic, the stratified layers under our old outhouse site could better be deciphered by a forensic gastronomist than a geologist, if you catch my drift. These days I’m treated to outhouse deja vu when I use the DEC’s Seventh Lake boat launch restrooms on a sultry August day or require the services of Chip Sauer’s Big Straw to clean out our septic tank. Man, the little puddle of residue that’s left behind in the driveway when they roll up the big straw, brings back fond nightmares for up to a week. I hope Chip’s trucking all of our Adirondack gold to Jersey.

Some Adirondack animals really stink. We don’t have many skunks in our woods, but we do have red fox. I like foxes, but they stink just like a skunk. You can smell a fox a mile a way. It’s no secret why British and American twits chase foxes with hounds and horses. They want those stinky creatures the hell outta their hoity toity neighborhoods. Any dog that can’t track a fox should be put down quicker than Old Yeller. I watched that tear jerker when I was thirteen and my hanky’s still wet. But I digress. Red foxes are the most widely dispersed carnivores in the world. They’ve spread their stink across the entire northern hemisphere, Asia, North Africa and Central America. And we all thought that smell was the masses of the great unwashed. Nope.  Their pungent fragrance comes from two anal sacs that ferment bacteria and produce stinky aliphatic acid. As a matter of fact, foxes also have stinky scent glands between their toes and in their jaws. Is there no end to their stinkiness. But I like foxes despite their abbynormal stinkiness. They have a vocal range spanning five octaves, two more than aromatic diva, Sarah Brightman.

I discovered recently that another Adirondack icon can be very stinky under the wrong circumstances. One of our plastic Adirondack chairs was knocked over in high winds and blew into the remnants of an evening campfire. Too bad Smokey the Bear wasn’t around. He can find a fire before it starts to flame. Our apologies Smokey; Deb and I assumed that the torrential rains had put our fire out, dead out. Evidently not, as our cats awakened us with their chattering at 4 a.m. They were looking out our picture window in amusement as the plastic chair was ablaze in the fire pit. I mean those suckers really burn. Who knew? I ventured forth in the rain and knocked off the flaming molten plastic with our fire poker.   

Man, does molten polywhatever stink. I discovered later that it must’ve taken most of the night in the campfire coals to transform the plastic from solid to liquid to vapor and finally into a volatile combustible. The deadly stink comes from dioxins, cyanides, hydrocarbons, plus ten year’s of putrefied beer and s’more residue.  

You know what really stinks about the Adirondacks? Having to pack up and leave the solitude of these mountains for a foray to good ole congested Falls Church, Virginny.  The only thing that doesn’t stink about returning to “civilization,” is catching up with family and friends and porking out at our favorite Thai and Vietnamese restaurants. In the interim, I carry my wading socks south in a hazardous waste container, so I’m never too far from the stink of primeval Adirondack ooze. My fishing socks remind me of the intoxicating lyrics of Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Can’t you smell that smell, Ooooh that smell, the smell of ooze surrounds me.”